Moscow, 1950s

One of Americans’ long-standing assumption about Cold War-era Soviet Russia is that only high-ranking Communist Party officials got to drive cars, but at least a few of the shots from this recent English Russia post featuring the photography of Naum Granovskiy suggest that the streets of Moscow weren’t as bare as we imagine. Still don’t see much of what we in the United States would call traffic, but more than we’d expect. What do you see here?

John V.says:

January 13, 2014 12:16 pm

And all of those stories of how Russian women were big & ugly and wore potato sacks…? I was in Minsk (technically “Belarus”, one of the former Soviet republics, but who’s counting) about 8 years ago and nothing could be further from the truth! Tall, thin, well dressed absolutely gorgeous women were everywhere. I thought that I had somehow stumbled into a Victoria’s Secret training camp…
Unfortunately, it seemed that they really weren’t into the customization or personalization of their cars like we are. Our hosts took me to see an older Russian car that had been “restored” but it looked more like something that a kid painted in his back yard to use as a beater car for the long Siberian winters.

January 13, 2014 2:14 pm

John C. Kovalosays:

January 14, 2014 11:16 am

I agree. Having grown up half-Byelorussian, half-Slovak, I thot all the East Euro ladies were dumpy and potato-like. My maternal Baba [grandmother] was built like a tractor!

Then one day i stumbled upon a photo of some rather thin and very foxy girls all dolled up, apparently at a dance or some social function. “Who are THEY?” I asked.
“Well, the one in the middle is your Mother, and THAT one is me” my Aunt said. Oh. ….OH!

Howard Arbituresays:

January 13, 2014 12:23 pm

Paul, NYCsays:

January 13, 2014 12:37 pm

Most of the cars in the first picture appear to be (not sure ofhte spelling) Pobedas. My first hthought was that they look a lot like 41-48 Plymouths, but studying the angle of the fastback puts me more in mind of the GM B body introduced in 1941 and continued throug the 1949 Buick Specials.

johnfromstaffssays:

January 13, 2014 12:59 pm

johnfromstaffssays:

January 13, 2014 1:08 pm

The car with the sidemount looks like a Zis 101, Cadillac body and Buick engine (ish). The top picture appears to be later by a few years than the bottom one. The beetleback cars are indeed GAZ Pobiedas.

January 13, 2014 2:12 pm

R Henrysays:

January 13, 2014 2:18 pm

As a college student in the late 1980’s, I spent a year overseas, living mostly in Wales. One of my courses was Soviet Studies, which included a 10 tour of Moscow and Leningrad. As a motorhead who longed to hear the music of a good V8 engine, I was severely deprived in the UK, tiny 4 pots were oh so common, with a L6 a very unusual sight. Once I arrived in Moscow however, the sound of gasoline fueled V8s was quite common. Many were rear-engined transit buses, with big, beautiful carburetors visible through the wire grates in the rear. I am fairly certain, by their exterior appearance, that they were hybridized knock offs of American big blocks. I saw valve covers that looked like they were from an International 345 cid, exhaust manifolds that looked very Fordish, and front mounted distributors that looked liked the GM/Delco units– with the little window on the side of the cap for adjusting the uni-set points while the engine was running. Nothing original–just a mishmash. They sounded great though!

geomechssays:

January 13, 2014 2:45 pm

Those trucks could be a derrivitive of Macks. There was a blacksmith/fix-it-all in my hometown who defected at the end of the war (joked that his unit beat the retreating Germans to allied lines). He drove trucks in Russia and they were Macks for the most part but they had electrical systems that dated back to the stone age. He told me some good stories about them, like how the generator cut-out points would arc and stick together thus burning up the generator/wiring harness after the truck was shut down. He fixed the problem on his unit by removing the cutout and installing a push-pull switch.

Ronsays:

January 13, 2014 6:21 pm

Gene Hermansays:

January 13, 2014 3:59 pm

Trolley bus in the top photo appears to be a ZIS-154. Streets are positively crawling with GAZ-M20 Pobedas.

Trucks that look life Ford AA’s in the bottom photo are just that : GAZ AA clones built under license from Ford. Big Buick-looking sedans at the bottom of the photo and going away just above it are ZIS 101’s, I believe.

johnfromstaffssays:

January 13, 2014 4:33 pm

almucksays:

January 13, 2014 4:21 pm

Well, I can’t identify any cars, but I can identify one of the buildings in the 2nd photo. The big brick building in the center of the photo with the big block letters is the office building for the newspaper “Izvestiya”. The name translates as, quite appropriately, “The News”.

John C. Kovalosays:

January 14, 2014 11:25 am

Scotty Gsays:

January 13, 2014 5:18 pm

We were in St. Petersburg and Moscow a few years ago and boy, talk about traffic in Moscow! And, the taxi ride from the airport in St. Petersburg to the hotel was crazy-go-nuts.. good LORD. Since the city is “closed” at night (they raise the bridges!) we had to make sure we got inside the city center before the dang bridges went up or it would have been not good, to say the least. I still remember the taxi bottoming out on almost every bump, and those crazy velour / velvet seats. Not to mention that squeaky escalator at the airport that they turn on when a flight comes in and then turn it off again once everyone is down on the main level going through the Man From Planet X-like x-ray machines. It’s a hard, hard, HARD country to travel in; wow. And, I mostly remember BMWs and Mercedes-Benzes when we were there; not many Russian-made vehicles, if there even is such a thing anymore.

larry youngsays:

January 14, 2014 9:42 am

Peter Van Keurensays:

January 14, 2014 1:28 pm

Bradley Laingsays:

January 14, 2014 12:21 am

—If you look closely at the second photo, the truck with the white canvas “box” covering has front fenders shapped like upper case “L”s. During WW II, the factory started making GAZ-AA trucks without the Model AA original French fenders. Instead they installed the “L” shaped ones.

JGTinNJsays:

January 14, 2014 9:50 am

When I was in the Soviet Union in the seventies there were many cars. I was told that to get one required a one to three year waiting period and cost more than the average buyer’s yearly salary in a full time job.

When I asked how could so many people afford to pay that I was told that they could do it by having at least three full time jobs. Three full time jobs? When would they sleep?

Oh no problem, they said, the three full time jobs were each a normal 8 hour day. The system was so corrupt that a worker did not have to show up full time at each job to be counted as a full time employee!

Lotusyanksays:

January 14, 2014 11:03 am

These pictures were propaganda. Only the party apparatchiks lived well. The rest barely got by. Remember that the failure of collectivization and Lysenkoism starved millions and millions. The politburo was forced to allow private garden plots where about 1/2 the food that sustained the proletariat was grown. The other 1/2 came from subsidized US and Canadian grain imports. When Khrushchev visited the US in ’59, he left awestruck at the wealth of the US. He was eventually ousted because his thinking about the US had changed. His eyes had been opened. Still the Soviets built some impressive structures. Too bad it was on the backs of peasants.

John C. Kovalosays:

January 14, 2014 12:40 pm

Sadly, Russian subjects never stood a chance. Prior to their liberation in March 1861, 23.1 million serfs represented 37.7% of the population as essentially free labor. Nearly 100 years later, at its height, the GULAG system imprisoned approx. 34% of the population, again as free labor. [1/3rd of the population in both cases.]

Prior to the Revolution, Russia was an Empire run by a Tsarist dictatorship. After the Revolution, Stalin soon hijacked the government and effectively set himself up as the greatest [and cruelest] Tsar of all. And, of course, now we have Putin.

The more things change, the more they stay the same for a People who, to this day, never effectively fought for their freedom from Tyranny, nor effectively de-centralized power enough to allow Democracy to take root.

Toivo Ksays:

January 14, 2014 11:26 am

I had to laugh when in the sidebar of the story there is a 57 Packard that looks like a ZIS!
All my relatives in the Estonian SSR when we visited in the mid seventies had cars usually Moskvitch. Frightening car.

johnfromstaffssays:

January 14, 2014 11:56 am

Starvin' Marvinsays:

January 14, 2014 2:30 pm

From Russia, with love. There was a TV commercial in the mid 70’s that had a Russian female in her early 40’s wearing a grey factory smock. The ad said, day-vear, evening-vear, & swim-vear, all in the same grey smock, the last frame she’s hoisting a beach ball. Very funny but someone was offended so the ad was pulled after a short run. The Russian diet combined with non-stop babies turns the Slavic dolls into middle linebackers, or worse. Wish I could remember what that ad was for, too many years ago, sigh.

Glenn Krasnersays:

January 14, 2014 6:35 pm

As our ally in WWII, the US government had Ford help set up the GAZ plant to manufacture the Ford-like trucks. As for car and truck production after the war, a lot of production was devoted to defense production for the Cold War, and there was not a lot of excess manufacturing capacity to manufacture luxury goods like cars. Trucks, tractors, tanks, yes – cars, no. We were fortunate to live here during the Cold War, to be able to enjoy the luxuries that our system offered. Glenn in the Bronx, NY.

Bradley Laingsays:

January 15, 2014 1:50 am

—The first GAZ built car was in 1932, 9 years before the war started. It was straight forwardly a licensed Ford Model A. After the war started, Soviet factories fled east, to do war production, out of range of the German Army. I supect that some US wartime aid including helping set up new factories for wartime production to the east of the fighting.

johnfromstaffssays:

January 15, 2014 8:08 am

Bradley Laingsays:

January 16, 2014 1:25 am

Glenn Krasnersays:

January 15, 2014 12:08 pm

Thank you for informing me of this, as I was completely unaware of the licensing arrangement. Funny, that the Soviets had to go to the ultimate capitalist, Henry Ford, to license a design. As for the wartime plant, its somehow burned in my memory, that there was a tv movie about a boy’s father going to the Soviet Union during the war to help set up the wartime factory for our ally. What happened during the movie I cannot remember – just remember that the boy’s father’s bus was pelted by rocks as he went to the plant. Thanks again for the information!

Bradley Laingsays:

January 15, 2014 1:53 am

Jim Benjaminsonsays:

January 15, 2014 2:09 pm

I forwarded this story to a friend of mine in Moscow, who works for Auto Review Magazine. Here are his comments on the photos….Fifties indeed – I’ve been there, lived right across the street from that ornate building on the first photo ))) it’s the Tschajkovsky Philarmonic Hall, and the dome to the right of it belongs to the Satyrical Theatre. At that time there’ve been as much as five theaters scattered around this square, and the movies as well, – a parking lot was organized in mid-60s in front of the Philarmonic, and a 1956 Pontiac Catalina in Cameo Ivory over Sunset Glow parked there had stolen my attention…

The second pic shows Pushkin Sq., about a mile down the same street, and the constructivistic edifice with round windows belongs to the newspaper called Izvestia (News) – someone in that newspaper used to drive a ’56 DeSoto Diplomat, in Turquoise. Later on, there were a ’66 Barracuda and then ’68 Charger in use by the newspaper’s deputy editor-in chief (who just happened to be a son-in-law to notorious Nikita Khruschov

Per Ahlstromsays:

January 15, 2014 8:01 pm

The Zis (which was the car for the upper echelons of the Soviet Communist Party) was originally a late 30s model Packard. The design, tooling, the whole works was sold to the Soviets.
The Moskwich, for the more ordinary communist officials, was started with an Opel design and tools.
Most Soviet cars and trucks were built on western designs, the exceptions being pretty horrible contraptions, like the rear engine Zaphorozetz or the weird minibuses, the name of which I have forgotten.
I actually visited the GAZ truck factory in Moscow in 1986, at the beginning of the Perestrojka (rebuilding), which led to the demolition of the Soviet five years later. The GAZ factory had a new COE truck in the works, patterned on a 10-year-old Volvo mid-size truck design, which they were very proud of and hoped would be as good as a Volvo. But the shifter came straight out of the gearbox and into the cabin, transferring vibrations and noise. The end result of their efforts was of the same technical standard as a Volvo from the early 50s. They couldn’t even make a good copy.
But I understand a lot of stuff has happened since then.
The cars in the pictures are probably all owned by the Communist Party or the Government in one way or another, directly or through some government agency or government run company, e.g. taxi companies. Soviet citizens could hardly buy private cars in the early 50s. Things changed when the soviets bought a license, tools and everything else needed to build a version of a Fiat in the mid-1960s. A giant car factory and a new city, Togliattigrad (named after an Italian communist) were built to produce the car. (Production was slow in the beginning, as they had forgotten to plan for removing the cars coming off the assembly line, but speeded up to produce considerable numbers of cars.) These cars were called Lada.
I have no idea about the present state of the Russian automobile industry, but its state under communism was pretty sad.